Hezbollah grabbed Soviet diplomats in Lebanon in 1986 and expected leverage. The KGB answered with ruthless pressure that forced a fast release and sent a message the region still remembers.
The Hook: Why This 1986 Hezbollah Kidnapping Still Matters
We don’t negotiate with terrorists…that’s a well-intentioned sentiment, to be sure. However, what if they were holding somebody for whom you actually cared deeply? Kidnapping is one of the most horrific of all modern crimes. It is a powerful tool in the dark, twisted toolbox of the modern criminal terrorist.
There is nothing new about any of this. People have been running off with other people’s people ever since we discovered we had opposable thumbs. Human beings form emotional attachments that are unimaginably profound. It really doesn’t matter how powerful you are. If your adversaries take a member of your tribe, chances are you’ll be ready to play ball. That is, unless you are the Soviet-era KGB.
The Setting: Lebanon’s Long Wars and a Powder-Keg 1986
I’ve spent a little time in the Middle East myself. It was arguably the most fascinating place I have ever visited. Old stuff in my neighborhood dates back a couple of hundred years. Old stuff over there might be a couple of thousand. It is enlightening to view Middle East politics through that profoundly antiquated lens.
I’m an American who lives in Mississippi. I take pride in my heritage and am imbued with a natural urge to defend it both literally and metaphorically. Human beings are tribal. You simply cannot fight that. No amount of aggressive social engineering will ever excise that fundamental attribute from our souls.
Folks have been killing each other over that curious scrap of Middle Eastern dirt ever since the very dawn of time. Sundry hatreds and assorted blood feuds date back hundreds of generations. Offenses and insults initially launched millennia ago still reliably foment bloodshed even today. It’s a cycle of violence that will not soon end. However, it can be mitigated. The Soviets showed us how to do that back in 1986.
The Players: Hezbollah Builds a Terror Machine, the KGB Takes Notice
Hezbollah has been a thorn in the flesh of the entire freaking world ever since its initial formation in Lebanon back in 1985. A terrorist organization dedicated to the tenets of radical Shia Islam and funded by the bloodthirsty nihilists in Iran, Hezbollah has been fomenting chaos on scales both large and small for some four decades now. Until recently, when they were systematically deconstructed by Israel, Hezbollah fielded a formidable regional army. Nowadays, several of their senior leadership positions remain unfilled, and their weapons caches are deep, smoking holes. I think the message there is don’t screw with the Israelis, but that’s a topic for another day.
Back in the mid-1980s, Hezbollah was still building its reputation in international terrorism. Pro-Syrian militiamen were shelling rival Muslim Hezbollah positions in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. Hezbollah grew weary of this. The Soviets were supporting these pro-Syrian militias. Hezbollah fully appreciated that implacable human tendency toward tribalism. Some Hezbollah rocket surgeon had the bright idea that they could kidnap a few Soviet diplomats and then use them as leverage to get the communists to call off the heat. What could possibly go wrong?
The Political Milieu: Cold War Muscle Meets a Lebanese Civil War
The Soviet Union formally collapsed the day after Christmas 1991. My abiding antipathy towards the Russians today likely stems from the fact that I spent my formative years expecting to be nuked by them at any minute. Today’s generation has the radical Islamists to fret about. For me and mine, it was the Russians. That’s probably the reason I would really love to see them get spanked in Ukraine.
Prior to 1991, the Soviets were unimaginably intimidating. They fielded tens of thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of troops just waiting to roar across the Fulda Gap and forcibly impose their communist ideals upon the rest of the species. They also spread unrest and rank terrorism anyplace they could touch. Back in 1986, one of those places was Lebanon.
I’ve not personally set foot inside Lebanon. However, I have peered across the Bekaa Valley and visualized what life there back in the 1980s must have been like. I’m told that Lebanon was once a lovely place. Beirut was known as the Rio of the Mediterranean. Upscale hotels, fine dining, and rarefied shopping opportunities made Lebanon a desirable vacation destination for well-heeled folks from around the globe. And then radical Islam happened. The resulting violent civil war tore the country apart. Even half a century later, there seems to be little sign of that getting substantively better.
The Lebanese Civil War ran from 1975 to 1990 and was a masterclass in how to destroy an otherwise nice country. Faction threw itself against faction. A dear friend who grew up in that ghastly place at that ghastly time once told me what it was like. Scampering across the Green Zone with his little backpack, he had to dodge sniper fire just to attend grade school. It was amidst this hellish world that Hezbollah was about to get sideways with the USSR.
The Kidnapping: Four Soviets Taken, One Killed, Stakes Skyrocket
The brouhaha began when Hezbollah fighters kidnapped four Soviet government officials on duty in Lebanon. Their demands were simply that the Soviets use their influence to stop the shelling of their positions. The attacks didn’t stop, so Hezbollah killed one of the hostages, a diplomat named Arkady Katkov.
At this point, the Soviet leadership had a decision to make. There were three of their officials still in captivity. Hezbollah claimed they were healthy but would not remain that way for long if the communists didn’t play ball. As a result, the Soviet diplomatic service turned the problem over to the KGB.
KGB is an acronym for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti which translates to the Soviet Committee for State Security. Founded in 1954, the KGB was a sort of arithmetic mean between the American CIA and the FBI, only operated by the military and enjoying essentially unlimited power. Vladimir Putin naturally got his start in the KGB.
The KGB technically went away in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. It was replaced in short order by the FSB along with several other sneaky-Pete alphabet agencies. Putin personally took the helm in 1989.
Options: Comply, Negotiate, or Unleash the KGB
The KGB could have complied with their demands or used some of their regional connections to open up a dialogue with the kidnappers. However, that’s not really the way they rolled. Instead, they dispatched a hit team to the region to take care of business.
Kidnapping in Lebanon during this time was an absolute scourge. In the decade between 1982 and 1992, 104 foreign hostages were seized. Once the dust settled, it was discovered that all of these people were taken by as few as a dozen individual terrorists, all operating under the umbrella of Hezbollah. Their leader was a proper villain by the name of Imad Mughniyah. However, it turned out that the terrorists themselves also had families. That was to be their undoing.
The Op: The KGB’s Message Lands and Hostages Walk Free
The Soviet hitters tracked down a close relative of Imad Mughniyah and kidnapped him. Without a great deal of fanfare, they cut off this unfortunate man’s penis and testicles and sent them in a box to Mughniyah along with a letter of explanation. The note elaborated that more of this man’s relatives would suffer a similar fate if the three remaining Soviet diplomats were not released quite sharpish. The other three (Oleg Spirin, Valery Mirikov, and Nikolai Svirsky) were set free unharmed in short order.
Those 104 foreign captives came from 21 different nations. There were 25 Americans, 16 Frenchmen, 12 Brits, 7 Swiss nationals, 7 West Germans, and 1 Irishman. At least eight perished in captivity. A few, like Arkady Katkov, were murdered to make some point or other. Still more succumbed to a lack of medical care in the austere conditions of their imprisonment. During the course of the protracted Civil War, some 17,000 Lebanese were also abducted. While some of these hostages were obviously eventually released, none were released as expeditiously as were those from the Soviet Union.
Practicalities: What Terrorists Understand About Power
And therein lies the rub. We cannot negotiate with the Russians or the sundry terrorist factions in the Middle East the way we might with more sensible folks. The Russians will always have their national best interest at heart and will gladly lie, cheat, slander, bribe, blackmail, or steal to get what they want. By contrast, the terrorists are just flat-out crazy. Neither group can be trusted…like, at all.
What all of these many-splendored psychopaths do understand is raw, unfettered power. They are not impressed with our altruism or our facility with words. They care not for our nation-building efforts or the Peace Corps. They understand and respect the capacity to forcibly impose one’s will upon others.
The very worst thing we could do when confronted by such darkness is exactly what we have done. When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, we just took our toys and went home. When we grew weary of feeding money, meat, and weapons into Afghanistan, Joe Biden just snatched everybody up and left the Afghan government to collapse under its own weight.
Our opponents study such stuff. We have inadvertently trained them to believe that if only you can keep nipping at the heels of the American monster long enough, eventually he will give up and leave. Tragically, they’re not wrong.
Ruminations: Hard Truths From a Ruthless Case Study
We can negotiate with people like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the mullahs in Iran until the sun burns out. We can pick them up and pack them off to Gitmo, offering them free healthcare and legal representation in the process. Or we could pull out the embedded reporters, give SOCOM a tasker with a broad, scary mandate, and then just get out of the way. I’m honestly not as torn up about stuff like due process and individual rights when it comes to international terrorists as I might be with normal people.
We can fool ourselves into thinking that modern unconventional war is honorable and tidy. Or we could make an example out of some psychotic unwashed cavemen and perhaps, in so doing, secure a lasting peace. That decision is ours to make…
Key Facts: 1986 Hezbollah Kidnapping vs KGB
| Year | 1986 |
|---|---|
| Location | Lebanon, primarily Beirut and Tripoli |
| Group | Hezbollah |
| Victims | Four Soviet diplomats, one killed (Arkady Katkov) |
| Response | KGB retaliation targeting relatives of Imad Mughniyah |
| Outcome | Three hostages released quickly, message sent across the region |
Intended to enhance the offensive capabilities of U.S. troops, the M203 grenade launcher attracted the attention of everyone from the Soviet Union to Hollywood. In today’s article, Will Dabbs takes a look at the 40mm launcher. — Editor
Say Hello to My Little Friend… It’s 1983 in Miami, and the illicit drug trade transformed penniless immigrants into millionaires in a matter of months. Tony Montana was the poster child. The product of a hardscrabble upbringing in the squalor of Castro’s Cuba, Tony had schemed, dealt, and murdered his way to the top of his massive cocaine empire. However, that simply meant he had a long way to fall.
Along the way, Tony made some powerful enemies. The combination of poor judgment, a penchant for violence, a personal drug habit, and the inability to manage chaos on such an epic scale meant that now Tony sat behind his expansive desk friendless and alone. Meanwhile, a veritable army of hired sicarios staged downstairs ready to turn him off. After snorting enough coke to orbit a rhino, Tony snatched up his M16-cum-M203 grenade launcher, charged it with an M433 HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) grenade along with a pair of 30-round box magazines taped back-to-back, and faced the door.
In what has come to be one of the most iconic lines in the history of cinema, Al Pacino’s Tony Montana shouted, “Say hello to my little friend!” before blowing the doors off their hinges with a 40mm round. The despotic drug lord then engaged in a roaring gun battle with the accumulated hitmen. Before it was over Tony had been shot about a zillion times. The chief hitman, nicknamed the Skull, then capped him from behind with a side-by-side 12-bore. Tony’s body pitched forward artistically to land in his indoor fountain. Fake blood went everywhere.
Okay, so let’s pick this apart. Brian DePalma’s magnum opus Scarface was indeed a cinematic classic. Much like Apocalypse Now that took its inspiration from the 19th-century Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness, the Scarface screenwriter Oliver Stone loosely adapted the story of Al Capone into the setting of 1980’s Miami. Al Pacino’s portrayal of the lost drug lord Tony Montana was arguably the most powerful role of his career.
The tactics of the shootout were, as expected, pretty ate up. Tony only fired two rounds out of his M203. In both cases the warheads should not have had time to arm based upon the abbreviated range. Tony did swap magazines a couple of times in his M16, so there’s that. In the final shootout, the Skull creeps up behind Tony with his shotgun oblivious to the dozen or so assault rifles and submachine guns shooting in his direction as they busily transform the doomed drug lord into so much dog food.
I’m nothing special, but I have some cool friends. I’ve actually hefted the weapon used in that scene. The M16 was fairly unremarkable, and the M203 was a theatrical dummy. However, back in 1983 for an impressionable young man planning a career as an Army officer, that cinematic sequence ignited a lifelong love affair with the M203 grenade launcher. I subsequently used them on and off for eight years in uniform. When finally I accumulated the means I bought my own.
In the Beginning…
The M203 grenade launcher is itself fairly uninspired. A slide-action, single-shot design, the action cocks automatically on opening. It is, in essence, just a big honking rifled tube that rides underneath the host rifle. There is a synthetic handguard riveted onto the barrel and a pivoting safety located inside the trigger guard.
To load the M203, you thumb the barrel release on the left and slide the tube forward. Slip in a round, close the tube, and ensure the safety is off. Point the M203 at something you dislike and squeeze. On the full-sized rig, there is a simple ladder sight attached to the top of the handguard or a more complex folding quadrant sight on the handguard. The real magic of the M203 is its ammo.
Like so many innovative weapon systems in common use now, the technology that drives our 40mm rounds today was derived from furious engineering efforts during World War II.
With the war raging, the Germans desperately churned out weapons to equip their massive army battling on two fronts. Meanwhile, British and American heavy bombers pounded German industrial facilities day and night. In an effort at conserving both propellant stocks and raw materials, the Germans designed the Hoch-und-Niederdruck System. This roughly translates into High-Low Pressure System.
Conventional high-velocity anti-tank cannon consumed relatively modest volumes of propellant, but required heavy barrels and breeches. Recoilless weapons like the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck, by contrast, were far easier to produce but consumed vast quantities of chemical propellant. The German High-Low Pressure System was designed to remedy that.
This revolutionary design is essentially a pressure vessel within a pressure vessel. High-pressure gases from the first chamber blew out a thin metal disk to spill into a second, larger chamber contained within a metallic shell. The resulting design accelerated a projectile relatively slowly resulting in a diminished recoil impulse allowing for a more generous payload. It also conserved propellant compared with other recoilless weapons.
Americanization
In 1960, the U.S. Army formally adopted the M79 Grenade Launcher. The 40mm grenade fired from the M79 was specifically designed to cover the dead space between hand grenades and 60mm mortars. By incorporating the German High-Low Pressure System into a stubby cartridge, the relatively low-velocity projectiles described a high arc such that they could drop in vertically behind cover.
The effective casualty radius for standard HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) round is five meters. The warhead will punch through two inches of steel armor plate. The maximum effective range is about 400 meters against area targets and 150 meters against point targets such as windows. All HE 40 mm rounds are spin armed and do not arm themselves until they have travelled about 30 meters beyond the tube.
For all its radical capabilities, the M79 was a single-shot weapon. Grenadiers were typically issued a 1911 handgun as a back-up. However, on the modern battlefield, the lack of a rifle was a serious handicap in a firefight.
The answer was the XM148 under-barrel grenade launcher. This single-shot launcher mounted underneath the barrel of a standard M16. The XM148 incorporated an extended trigger assembly that was accessible without removing the firing hand from the pistol grip. This weapon saw limited field use in Vietnam but was found to be susceptible to accidental discharges when jungle foliage caught in the exposed trigger. The subsequent M203 effectively addressed these problems.
Ruminations
An M16 or M4 equipped with an M203 is undeniably portly. Additionally, the slide-action nature of the design limits the length of the ammunition that fits in it. The current replacement, the M320, sports a pivoting barrel that alleviates that problem.
My M203 came from Lewis Machine and Tool. The M203 is classified as a Destructive Device (DD) and requires an extensive process to transfer. Live M433 HEDP rounds are literally non-existent on the civilian market, but Pace Defense will sell you all manner of cool-guy stuff to legally keep your registered M203 amply fed with alternate ammo options.
Owning your own M203 is lyrically impractical but nonetheless remains more fun than watching chimps manage Slinkies. Heavy, bulky, and expensive yet inimitably cool, the M203 is a proper addition to any well-seasoned gun collection. Say hello to my little friend … .
Today’s MREs are actually quite tasty. Public domain.
Stolen valor is apparently a thing nowadays. Posers hungry for affirmation will contrive exciting tales of their fabricated time in military service in an effort to impress girls or garner accolades they have not earned. That’s honestly pretty low. If you want folks to think you’re awesome, just put in the work. Faking that is just pathetic.
Delta Force and DEVGRU rightfully get all of the press. Kicking in doors is cool, and these guys are the world’s recognized masters at it. However, very few military veterans actually did anything at all like that.
Only about 10% of troops in uniform are actually trigger pullers. The rest of us carried the bullets, moved the real heroes around on the battlefield, provided fire support, or just generally made sure they had the stuff they needed to do that incredibly difficult job. Truth be known, much of that was not terribly compelling, but it had to be done.
In the Information Age, stories of military derring-do are never more than a click away. YouTube is dirty with interviewers teasing out the stories of Army Rangers, Delta shooters, and the like for an enraptured audience. There is a running joke in the military that baby SEALs are issued a book contract upon graduation from BUD/S. Whenever I have a mindless task to perform, I invariably open my laptop and run those stories in the background. I tell myself it is so I can find inspiration for my writing. Reality is that I just enjoy it.
So, how do you tease out the real veterans from the fake ones? It’s actually simpler than you might think. Just ask about a rock or something.
The cheesy diagram on the side of the MRE FRH certainly gets the point across.
An Army Marches on Its Stomach
It is a soldier’s lot to gripe about his chow. Ever since the legionaries traipsed all the way across the known world, grunts have complained about their grub. Some of that was fully justified. In the Information Age, however, the American military’s food is actually quite good. That’s because, as a nation, we’re really, really rich.
Uncle Sam spends $3 million a pop on a modern TLAM cruise missile. He also invests a fair amount of time and treasure in keeping his modern grunts sustained in austere spaces. Leading that technological charge is the modern iteration of the MRE.
MRE is milspeak for Meals, Ready-to-Eat. We called them Meals, Refused-by-Ethiopians, but that’s not really fair. Early versions were pretty sketchy, but today’s fare is actually superb.
Origin Story
The first American military ration actually spawned as the result of a Congressional Resolution back during the Revolutionary War. Over time, those basic staples of beef, peas, and rice evolved into K-rations in World War II and canned C-rations or “C-Rats” in Vietnam.
In 1963, the Army began experimenting with Space Age packaging and preservation methods to make field rations lighter and more shelf-stable. Three years later, this led to the Long Range Patrol or “LURP” ration. LRP rations eventually begat modern MREs.
What really sets our grub apart is the fact that we can offer American troops three hot meals a day anywhere on Planet Earth. That’s because of a nifty widget included in every MRE today called the FRH — short for Flameless Ration Heater. We started including FRHs in every MRE in 1993.
Behold, the coolest tattoo in the world. This guy clearly served. Social media photo.
The Beating Heart of the FRH
The FRH consists of iron and magnesium powder sprinkled with some table salt. Slide your MRE entrée into the included pouch along with a little water, and the FRH does its thing. A single FRH will heat an MRE entrée to around 140 deg F in about 12 to 15 minutes. In my not-insubstantial experience, these bad boys work like champs.
What makes this entire enterprise entertaining is the iconography used to explain how these devices are employed. There is a simple little cartoon printed on the side of the FRH pouch that walks you through the process. Once the FRH is charged with your grub, you fold the top of the pouch over and slip it back into the cardboard sleeve that contained your entrée. At that point, the entire assembly must be maintained at a specific angle for optimal performance. The cartoon recommends you use a “Rock or Something” to get this done.
That term, “Rock or Something,” has burrowed its way into the military lexicon. I have seen it on bumper stickers, morale patches, and even a few tattoos. I don’t have a better idea myself. It is simply that “Rock or Something” just seems a wee bit sophomoric. Reliable sources assert that it began as a bit of an inside joke among the good folks who developed these things in the first place and has now become legend.
So, the next time you bump into some rugged-looking dude who arouses your curiosity concerning his background, don’t ask about BUD/S, jump school, RIP, or Delta selection. Anybody with an internet connection can fake that. Just ask about a rock or something. That’s the easiest way to separate the players from the posers.
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Today, the Justice Department opened an investigation to determine whether Philadelphia Police use a vague “good cause” standard to cancel permits to carry legal firearms.
The U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the civil right keep and bear legal firearms — including the right to legally carry firearms where allowed. The investigation focuses on the Philadelphia Police’s permitting system; the investigation does not support any armed obstruction of federal or local law enforcement.
“I have directed the Civil Rights Division, through our Second Amendment Section, to defend law-abiding citizens from local authorities who infringe the right to safely carry legal firearms,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Law-abiding Americans, regardless of where they live, should not have to worry that their city will revoke their means of self-defense.”
It is a violation of the Second Amendment for government officials to use vague, personal discretion when determining whether to issue or revoke permits to carry firearms.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark decision District of Columbia v. Heller, held that the Second Amendment protects the right of law-abiding citizens to possess weapons that are in common use for lawful purposes.
In 2022, the Supreme Court held, in another case, that permitting officials may not base licensing decisions merely on their personal discretion. Here, it is alleged that Philadelphia Police use just such a discretionary standard to improperly limit Second Amendment rights.
The Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section enforces the Second Amendment. If you believe your right to keep and bear arms is being infringed, please submit a complaint through www.justice.gov/crt/second-amendment-section.